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Ubud, Bali Indonesia

We drove up to Ubud with Made who owns Made’s Transportation madelamppung@yahoo.com He was a great driver and he only charged 350,000 IDR for the 10 hour excursion that we took with him to Ubud. His vehicle was new and clean and accommodated the 6 of us very well. 350,000 is roughly 40 USD for all of us total for a full day of driving us where we wanted to go, which is an excellent price.

Ubud is easy to fall in love with and we did not even see much of it. We unfortunately ran out of time to see the rice terraces due to traffic congestion. If traffic was good it would only be a very short drive but due to the awful traffic in Bali it adds another 2 hours to your trip. The good news is that there is always something to look at on the side of the road like one of many temples or stray dogs or businesses etc. Bali is called the island of a thousand temples and the temples are spectacular and ornate. Bali is 80% Hindu and their daily offerings are littered all over the streets and temples from flowers to food. In Bali you are called to prayer 3 times a day; 6am, noon and 6pm. The call is nicer than a Muslim call. The Hindu call to prayer has chimes and not so much of a chanting sound. The music prayer is quite pleasant to listen to. The first place that we visited was the main temple. We had to wear sarongs which are loaned to you for 1000 IDR or one dollar. The temple was very pretty and it was 1300 years old and covered in this bright green moss that seems to be everywhere in Bali due to the moisture. It rained most days while we were in Bali but usually at night or for a short time during the day. The rainy season is from November to March.

Made dropped us off at a silver jewellery store and it was a bit disappointing, the prices they were asking were way too high and I was not in the bargaining mood. We next went to the market in Ubud. It was wonderful and we spent about 2 ½ hours in the quagmire of stores and offerings. I could have spent double the time in there, because there was a ton of silk to buy. We had my baby nephew and Daxtin with us and let’s not forget Darren and none of those 3 is a shopper. Melissa, Kim and I could have shopped longer. I still did buy some things given the limited time; all silk.

I definitely want to return to Ubud and check it out much more in depth. There are hills in Ubud and the streets are curvy. It is very lush and green and it is supposed to be beautiful to see the rice terraces. No sweat, we will return most defiantly in the near future to explore more of what there is to see in Bali.We drove along Monkey Forest Road and there are a ton of really cool shops that I would have liked to walk along and shop all day at. We actually were supposed to stay one night in Ubud but we had booked long ago before we knew that family was going to meet us in Bali and we chose to stay with family in Seminyak instead, in their townhouse which was beautiful.

We ended up at Monkey Forest which is a park that is full of you guessed it, monkeys. They are everywhere and they are not shy and they will walk right up to you to get food or right behind you and then you turn around and they are right there. There were many monkey moms with babies and they were adorable.

In the forest you get a good idea of the rainforest that Bali is with its humongous trees with the most unusual root systems. There are vines everywhere and plants that you would have in your house but about 20 times larger than the leaves on your plants. The forest almost looks primordial and mysterious.

We left the numerous amounts of monkeys because it was getting too close to rush-hour and we wanted to avoid the traffic at its worst so we hopped back into the car for the traffic congested drive back to Seminyak. We booked Made for a trip back to the airport for only 90,000 IDR which is about 10 dollars for a ½ hour trip.